Few artists excavate their emotional wounds as vividly and insistently as Angel Haze. Tonight, whether wrestling with the demons of her mental health, the psychological toll of being a black American in 2016 or the gory details of her romance and subsequent breakup with model Ireland Baldwin, Haze is unflinching.
Rage, loss and the inescapable state of her own damage may permeate her music, but she’s far from a maudlin presence. “Do you feel like shit?” she asks the audience – but it’s a rallying cry for like-minded souls, and Haze commands an intensely loyal fan following. Her pain is not a vehicle for self-pity but a source of power. “Considered suicide, I do that these days,” she raps matter-of-factly on Impossible – a clattering, percussive statement of intent. A couple of lines later, she turns the brain she repeatedly refers to as a cage into a hand grenade to destroy her enemies; later, on the ferocious Babe Ruthless, going out of her mind means breaking free.
Clad in black with her baseball cap pulled low over her face, Haze is a magnetic performer, both in terms of the pure feeling that fuels her and her remarkable technical proficiency. The ducking and weaving of her rapid-fire rapping has long been her trademark, but tonight her singing voice is a revelation. Haze’s latest album, Back to the Woods, is a self-released triumph after the misfire that was her major -label debut, Dirty Gold, from which material is wisely kept to a minimum. But if pop choruses from hired hands bogged the latter down, Haze’s own melodies on Moonrise Kingdom and Dark Places are yearning and beautiful in their evocation of a doomed love story.
Haze also showcases something of a lupine fixation tonight – another way for her to shape-shift. She sings of being an abandoned wolf cub in the aching outro of The Eulogy – but as it transitions into The Wolves, Haze morphs into the leader of a wolf pack. Wading on to the floor, Haze disappears from view as her devotees crowd around her; when she leads them in a chorus of howls, what could be a corny moment becomes genuinely rousing. Back on stage, Haze spits: “I’m the big bad wolf, I’mma take the throne” – rap braggadocio as sheer catharsis.
- At Fleece, Bristol, 16 February. Tickets: 0117-945 0996
